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Kazaa Says On Track to Be Most-Downloaded Program
Cody Watkins writes "Reuters has a story about Kazaa surpassing ICQ as the most downloaded piece of software (according to C|Net Download.com). 'As of late Thursday, the Kazaa Media Desktop application -- a file-sharing software that has drawn the wrath of the music industry by enabling its users to swap songs for free -- had been downloaded 229,150,955 times, as measured by Download.com.'"
You'll note that the origin for this story is CNet, and that the metric that they are using is download.com (owned by CNet). Since Kazaa.com actually links straight to download.com, it's not surprising that they have the highest numbers on download.com.
Over 335 million unique RealPlayer/RealOne Player registrations have been received by RealNetworks.
Other software makers (who don't use download.com) probably also have numbers higher than Kazaa.
Kinda works under wine too
But, you see, OSS for Windows is catching on! Some of the most popular programs on Sourceforge are win32. Everything that you need for spyware-free commercial-free RIAA-free music and video sharing is available there, on sf.net. Here's a sampling:
CDEX - a great MP3 ripper. Use with LAME for great, free rips.
eMule and DC++ - very popular P2P clients
BitTorrent - For large file sharing (movies, etc)
VirtualDub - for video format conversion (DiVX, VCD, etc)
Audacity - multi-track audio editor
I could go on and on. Look at this list and all the win32 apps there.
That is true. There are numerious buffer overflows within mpeg itself. With Windowsw2k unpatched I have clicked on porn only to have hidden code in the mpeg launch IE and god knows what. Most of it just directs me to their site full of full screen pop-ups that are impossible to close. Annoying and plain obnoxious. It is by the same porm spammer who hides the same advertisements for his site. I think his site is www.firstime.com. I do not remember. Do not go there unless you want 10 full screen pop-ups that even alt+f4 will not close thanks to nasty javascripts.
Anyway my machine got hacked as well. It connected to port 666 which is irc doing god knows what. My guess is from the mpegs because I have a firewall.
Anyway if your doing a new pc installation always patch WIndows first, before proceeding to anything else. This is common sense but I had no idea how insecure windows was until I saw this first hand. I do not believe slashdot antiMS hype. My old man without a firewall got hacked with 20 minutes after he got his dsl. He ran outlook unpatched. Amazing!
I had to reformat my drive and start over after the kazaa-lite fiasco just to get rid of the virii. I am too cheap for an anti-virus checker.
With Windows2k and media player fully patched the same mpegs do not launch IE or any extra code. My guess is the website owner used the buffer overflow to zombie my machine and direct my to his website hoping I would pay money for his lousy crap.
http://saveie6.com/
A simple thing like FTP for example, to update our websites.
FileZilla, GPL'd, I think.
Webcam, I agree, hard to find free & decent win32 programms.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?